“So you’ve been seeing another woman, “she said, lightly, when he returned from the bar with two large glasses of house red and explained that Rhodri Jenkins had sent him to a hypnotherapist, in order that he might learn to relax, and thus be better able to cope with the stresses and strains of classroom life.
“She’s older than my mother,” Steve told her, “and not so good-looking.” Janine had met Steve’s mother, and had complimented her by saying that it was obvious where Steve got his looks from. Steve’s mother, in consequence, thought that Janine was a “very nice girl—better than you deserve”.
“Did she hypnotize you, then?” Janine asked.
“Of course—that’s what I went for. It’s not like stage hypnotism, though, or old movies with swinging watches and rotating spirals. You don’t really go into a trance. She’d told me that I ought to make a CD in my computer that will take me through the stages of relaxation in the comfort of my own home. Do you want eat here, or shall we go on somewhere else?”
“Might as well stay here,” she said. “I know it’s only Tuesday, but I’m already feeling a touch of end-of-the week apathy. Can I get a copy—of your CD, I mean? Then we could both learn to relax.”
“I think it needs to be personalized. Besides which, you’re relaxed enough already. I don’t know how you do it, since you’re dealing with members of the public all day, but you seem perfectly able to shrug it off even when someone does have a go at you.”
Janine shrugged, as if to demonstrate how it was done. “Shit happens,” she said, in an insouciant one. “You have to take things in your stride. You get upset for a moment, then you wind down.”
“I find it much more difficult than that,” Steve admitted. “Things get to me, I guess, and gnaw away at me. I worry.”
“I’ve noticed—but I didn’t think it was so bad that you’d have to seek professional help. Is there anything more I should know? If you’ve got dark secrets, I’d rather know about them sooner than later.”
Steve contemplated brushing the question off with a flippant remark, but he found himself in the unaccustomed position of not wanting to tell his girl-friend an outright lie—not, at any rate, an unnecessary outright lie.
“Stress can really take its toll on teachers,” he said, earnestly. “It’s not a trivial matter. You’re fortunate to have a natural resistance to that sort of thing.”
“Oh, it’s not natural,” she said. “I got a lot of practice at home. My mother got upset over the slightest thing—so much so that she was almost impossible to live with. She loved me, I suppose, but I was such a worry to her that the love never got a look in—and Dad just armored himself by withdrawing into his obsessions. I’d never have believed that a man could treat a pub quiz like an Olympic final if I hadn’t seen him in obsessive action. I just went the opposite way. Shit happens—that’s my motto. Accept it and move on. That’s easy to say, mind, while I’m not put under too much pressure. I suspect that I’ve got my breaking point. Is it really so difficult to deal with stroppy children?”
“The A level groups aren’t so bad,” Steve said, “but the year elevens are awful. Most of them will reach the age of consent during the year. Combined with the fact that they’ll be sitting their GCSEs next May, that turns the classroom into a witches’ cauldron of seething hormones, fear of being left out, terror of not being in with the crowd, anxiety about not being able to cut it...you must remember the recipe from your own schooldays.”
“Sure,” Janine said. “Alison, Milly and I were witches all right, cackling away like the best of them. Gave our teachers hell, I suppose, although we didn’t think of their poor nerves at the time—or, if we did, only about how better to get on them in the hope of inducing a comprehensive breakdown. Okay, I take it back—stroppy adolescents probably are far worse than people complaining about their holidays from hell and whining about the inadequacy of the travel insurance they never wanted to buy. Can your hypnotherapist and your do-it-yourself relaxation CD take care of that, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Can’t hurt, at any rate. Shall I place our orders at the bar? What do you want?”
There must have been something in Steve’s tone that he hadn’t intentionally incorporated into it, because Janine picked up on the fact that there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” she said, after she’d made her selection from the menu. “Either that, or there’s some other reason you went to the therapist. You don’t have to tell me, of course—but I really would prefer it if I didn’t discover some dark secret six months into our relationship that you could have come clean about much sooner. That wouldn’t be nice.”
Steve could have fenced that off by saying that six months was a long time, relationship-wise, and that maybe she was being over-optimistic, but he knew that wasn’t the right thing to do, in the circumstances. “I have a phobia,” he said, reluctantly, when he returned from the bar clutching a numbered ticket “I don’t think Sylvia will be able to do much about that, though, except maybe ameliorate the symptoms. Then, in the faint hope of deflecting the obvious question, he added: “She wanted to try regression, and persuaded me to agree, but it turned into a farce. I didn’t even get back to my childhood. I only remembered some stupid sci-fi nightmare. Sylvia took it seriously, though—she tried to persuade me to go to some support group for nutcases. Would you believe that there’s actually a group called Alien Abductees Anonymous, and that they have a branch in Wiltshire?”
Janine astonished him by saying: “Oh, I know all about that. My friend Milly goes regularly—she’s been trying to persuade Alison and me to go with her for ages. They meet over in East Grimstead—she must be serious about it, because she takes the bus.”
Steve seized upon the unexpected opportunity to draw the conversation into what seemed to be safer waters. “Your friend Milly thinks she’s been abducted by aliens?” he queried. “When? What happened to her?”
“Oh, she’s never confided in me or Alison,” Janine said, with a slight hint of bitterness. “I don’t even know whether she’s ever told her story to the group. She says there’s no pressure on people to talk about their experiences if they don’t want to, but that it helps just to listen. If you ask me, she just got addicted to support groups after the other one. That one cured her, after a fashion, so she’s being more careful this time—eking it out, so to speak.”
“What other one?” Steve asked, glad for the opportunity to take control of the conversational tempo. Even though he didn’t know Milly, he was fully entitled to ask about her, because Janine had brought the subject up and left the information she’d supplied tantalizingly incomplete.
“It was a group for people with Eating Disorders.”
“You mean she’s fat—or was.”
“No, the opposite. When we were at school she got very thin after GCSEs. She used to make herself sick after eating—even after school lunches. Mind you, that wasn’t so very unusual once we got to year eleven. Alison and I were never in the sick club, but there was quite a clique. The pressure of the A levels that we never got around to taking, I suppose. We could have—we were all clever enough, Ali especially, but none of us wanted to. Milly’s bulimia just gave us one more reason for resolving to get out. She never committed herself fully to the clique, mercifully; Ali and I remained her crucial connection to normality. As I said, she’s cured now, and had to move on from the Eating Disorders group. She eats normally, and works out a quite a bit at the police gym. Did you know that traffic wardens are allowed to use the police gym? She gets preferential treatment housing-wise as well—a special flat for key workers, Ali’s got one too, but travel agents don’t qualify.”
“Teachers do,” Steve said, “but I prefer my own place—I like older houses. So, is Milly contentedly plump now?”
“No. She’s bigger than me—nearly as tall as you, I suppose—so she can carry more weight that I can without looking fleshy. Actually, she l
ooks very good—the broad shoulders and big bones give her an athletic look. Beside her, I look like a fragile doll. She needs that sort of appearance, mind—being a traffic warden’s definitely a high stress job. Victims of road rage are even worse than rebellious pheromone-crazed adolescents. Should I recommend your hypnotherapist to her, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Sylvia’s a fan of AlAbAn, at any rate. She’d approve of Milly going, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t disapprove,” Janine said. “I just prefer conventional girls’ nights out to support groups.”
“You get free tea and biscuits, so I’m told,” Steve rambled on, “although I don’t suppose that’s much of an attraction, if she’s paranoid about what she eats.”
“She’s not, any more,” Janine reminded him. “She’d really appreciate it if we gave her a lift, mind. The bus service is terrible. She doesn’t drive herself, you see—doesn’t think it’s becoming for a traffic warden to fraternize with the enemy.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking of going,” Steve said. “I know perfectly well that I haven’t really been abducted by aliens. The ones who think they have wouldn’t want someone like me there, sticking my skeptical oar in. Your Milly probably wouldn’t like it either. Hang on—that’s our number. Back in a sec.”
When he came back with the two plates and the cutlery, Janine was quick to take up the thread of the conversation. “They don’t mind skeptics, apparently,” she said. “According to Milly, they’re very tolerant—she says it’s a very supportive support group—much more so than the Eating Disorder group, which tended to be much stricter and more censorious. There are rules, though, that everyone has to follow. I don’t think you’re allowed to accuse the other members of the group of being deluded or telling lies. I think we should go, though; it might be fun.”
Steve gathered that Janine was at least slightly curious about her friend’s involvement with AlAbAn, and was not ungrateful for an excuse to relent in her refusal to attend the meetings. Steve wasn’t so sure that Milly would be pleased about it, but when Janine insisted on ringing Milly’s mobile there and then, without even finishing her food, she carried through her mission with irresistible aplomb.
“That’s settled, then” Janine said, as she put her phone back in her bag. “You’d better pick me up first, between six-thirty and six forty-five. I said we’d get to her before seven. The meeting starts at seven-thirty, but they like people to be prompt.”
“Right,” said Steve, uncertain whether to be mildly annoyed because the decision had been take out of his hands or mildly pleased because Janine seemed to have forgotten all about his reasons for seeking hypnotherapeutic assistance. “I guess that’s a date, then.”
* * * *
The very concept of a “support group” had always sent a vague shiver through Steve’s body, and the notion that someone like him might be in need of an institution like AlAbAn was slightly horrifying. Under the circumstances, though, he was able to justify his impending attendance at the AlAbAn meeting as a means by which Janine could introduce him to one of her closest friends, and thus move their relationship forward by one more small but vital step.
As Janine had mentioned. Milly lived in one of the brand new flats that had been built near the city centre, in one of the smaller ones reserved for occupancy by “key workers”. It was a nice flat, with central heating—which Steve’s flat didn’t have, being reliant on an old-fashioned gas fire for winter heat—but it was rather tiny. Milly was, indeed, built on a more generous scale than Janine, but she was wearing flat heels, so she was still a comfortable inch shorter than Steve. She wasn’t as exquisitely beautiful as Janine, but the relative boldness of her features was matched by a boldness of attitude and manner that chimed in perfectly with the style of her looks. Steve wouldn’t have cast her as Helen of Troy—although he could see Janine in that role—but he reckoned that she would have made a strikingly imperious and satisfyingly voluptuous Cleopatra. She greeted Steve warmly, telling him that she’d heard a lot about him.
“All good, I hope,” Steve said, lazily falling back on the conventional cliché rather than trying to improvise something wittier.
“Oh yes,” Milly said. “Quite an ad, really—but Jan’s always polite about her boy-friends. Ali’s the one who always runs them down. Jan always thinks she might have got hold of a good one at last—but in your case, she’s certainly not mistaken about your boy-band looks. You’d make a very handsome couple if you weren’t so much taller than she is.”
“Don’t mind Milly,” Janine put in. “She’s a past master of the back-handed compliment. It’s me she’s insulting, in what she thinks is a subtle fashion, not you.”
“I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of delicacy as well as beauty,” Steve said, ostensibly to Milly. “I like Janine’s perfect economy of form as much as I like her perfect facial symmetry. She’s practically my ideal.”
“Oh dear,” Milly said. “Practically your ideal. And Jan thinks I’m one for back-handed compliments. You’ll have to watch out for that margin, Jan—the next thing you know, he’ll be referring to your almost perfect economy of form and your almost perfect facial symmetry, and it’ll all be downhill from then on. I’m all ready—we can go.”
Fortunately, Milly didn’t have time to quiz Steve about why he was going to the AlAbAn meeting during the journey to East Grimstead, because she was too eager to instruct both her companions in the nature and etiquette of the group. “They’re not at all doctrinaire,” she told them, wriggling slightly to settle her backside more comfortably into the rear seat of Steve’s Citroen. “It’s not in the least unusual for the stories they tell to be wildly different, even mutually contradictory, but everyone’s supposed to be supportive, no matter what improbabilities they’re faced with, and everyone is. You mustn’t challenge anything anyone says, even if you think you’ve found some crucial logical flaw or elementary violation of the laws of physics. It’s taken for granted that everyone’s experience is valid, no matter how peculiar it might be, and that everyone’s equally deserving of trust and moral support. If you listen quietly for two or three meetings, you’ll find yourselves slipping into it very easily.
“Amelia, the hostess, is one of those incredibly polite and pleasant old dears that everyone wishes they had for a granny, and Walter, the chairman, has a remarkable way with people. If anyone steps out of line, he just eases them back into it with the utmost gentleness. I never knew anyone so good at compelling politeness. He’d probably have been the greatest traffic warden the world has ever seen, instantly quelling the worst road rage with a slight frown and a few soothing words, but I’m not absolutely certain what he actually did before he retired—something to do with insurance, I think. You’ll find that a lot of the crowd are pretty old, although all age-groups are fairly represented.
“Walter and Amelia have been running the group for more than forty years, since the 1960s—although it wasn’t always called AlAbAn. Walter reckons that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, but that the aliens have some kind of device for blanking out the memories. He thinks that the people who remember what happened are a tiny minority, who often need help to bring the buried memories back to the surface as well as help in coming to terms with them, but he also thinks they’re enormously privileged, because they obtain glimpses of possibilities far beyond those available to our narrow lives. He considers AlAbAn members the most privileged of all, because they have the chance to see how their glimpses fit in with others. Not that there’s any overall pattern that I can see, although you often catch echoes of one person’s story in another.”
This last item of news didn’t surprise Steve in the least. He figured that the real purpose of the group, for most of its members, must be to assist in the elaboration of individual confabulations. People went there, he assumed, in order to plagiarize bits of other people’s delusions to make their own more detailed, and perhaps more satisfactory. He hope
d that by forewarning himself of this fact he might forearm himself against any similar effect, although he didn’t think that it would do him any great harm to start dreaming about other people’s supposed alien abductions, or even projecting himself into such dreams, provided that he remained fully conscious of the fact that dreams were what they were. He was confident, as a man of science—even the second-rate kind who taught science to school kids rather than actually doing it—that he could resist the temptation to start believing in nonsense simply because it was sometimes spouted by people who had the gift of the gab, capable of sweetening the tempers of road hogs and selling ice to Eskimos.
Before picking Milly up, Steve had vaguely assumed that the AlAbAn group would meet in East Grimstead’s village hall, but by the time they had passed through West Grimstead Milly had disabused him of that notion and had given him fair warning that the front room of Amelia Rockham’s so-called cottage could get a little crowded.
Steve was surprised to find, when he, Janine and Milly arrived, that there were already twenty-five people gathered, most of them perched on folding chairs with no space to stretch their legs. There were more than enough tea-cups to go round, though; Mrs. Rockham was obviously used to catering for such numbers. She greeted the newcomers warmly, and told them not to be shy about grabbing their fair share of the biscuits, because no one else would be.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 3